Joint CEC/CASE Meeting

The meeting came to order at 9:00 am. It was a phone conference through Skype. Participants were: Diane Breuning, Kathy Porter, Maria Rascon, Lorrane McPherson, Lorie Gerkey, Diane Grayson, Kaye Turner, and Mary Brownell.
Topics:
State Conference: "Special Education 2.0: Interacting Today", March 6, 2009, at the Black Canyon Center in Phoenix:
1. Julie Weatherlee and Ed O'Leary are all set up. Kathy Porter asked for the bios for the conference packets. Lorie Gerkey will be speaking to them and will get them.
2.Denise Lowell-Britt: Maria will be speaking to her today and will confirm that she is set for the 1:15 and 2:45 slots. The content will be the latest in Arizona law.
3. ADE will do a session at 1:15 on currect topics in special education in the state.
4. Diane Breuning and her team will do a repeat of Professional Edge. There will be two sessions in the afternoon. Kathy reports a lot of interest in having this topic again as it was very well-received at last year's conference.
5. Ed O'Neal, expert in EDBD, will do a session on strategies for behavior management. Since he is part of the statewide cadre, he has asked if his registration will be paid. Kathy will email him to ask him to talk to ADE about whether they will be picking up his registration cost.
6. Kim Peaselee has submitted a proposal to do a session/sessions on co-teaching at the secondary level: implementation and staff training and management. This is a topic we have wanted to cover; Kathy will email her to ask her how many sessions she can do. She is also involved in National CEC and can help us forward our mission (hopefully).
7. Kathy Shaw is available for 3 sessions. The topic will be practical ideas for classroom accommodations. She did this strand at the Toolbox conference several years ago and it was very well-received.
8. Tamara Wheeler is available to do 3 sessions on elementary co-teaching.
9. Kathy will follow up with Vail District to see if they will do a strand on RTI.
10. Autism strand: we had discussed having an all day strand on this topic. Diane will ask again at ASU about having someone do a session on current research. Mary will ask Chris Casanova, an SLP from Kyrene who is currently in charge of an autism training team at the district level, to do a session on strategies for teachers. She will be given the choice of which session (10:30, 1:15, 2:45-all sessions are one hour and fifteen minutes). Diane will possibly do a session on what teachers are saying they need in terms of training to work with students with autism.
11. Maria will do a session on paraprofessionals and their training needs.
12. Our current registration is very low, but Lorrane reports that this is not unusual for this time of the year, and that people wait to register until they see the schedule of break-outs. Lorrane will put the schedule on the website and will send it out via email when she re-sends the flyer.
13. Awards: Diane Grayson reports on the CEC awards: she is getting nominations for the student I-Can-Do-It awards, but not for the adult awards (Sam Kirk Teacher of the Year and Distinguished Service). All are asked to think of nominees, especially for the Distinguished Service.
Maria Rascon has nominations for the CASE awards. There was a discussion about nominating a local special education attorney for the Laura Genung award.
Lorrane will ask ADE to put the nominations for the CEC adult awards out on the state Listserv.
14. Lorrane will send out applications for 10 teacher scholarships to attend the conference.
15. Vendors: Dave Roels will be in charge. Most vendors have been going to Lorrane to ask questions and get registered since they are looking on the website. We appear to have enough vendors. Dave will be at the conference, but will be out of town for the two weeks prior to the conference, so Kathy will check with Dave to see if tables have been assigned.

National Conference:
1. Attending will be Maria, Diane Breuning, Diane Grayson, and Kathy Porter will ask to be released so she can attend.
2. Reimbursement for AZCEC board members to attend the national conference is currently $1,000.
After discussion about rising costs, a motion was made by Kathy Porter and seoonded by Diane Grayson to increase reimbursement to $1,500. The motion passed.

Current membership in AZCEC is 514. This is about 500 fewer than we had about 5 years ago. There was a brief discussion about possible reasons for this, most having to do with money.

The next meeting will be Monday, Feb. 2, at 8:00 pm. It will be a phone conference through Skype.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:45 am.

Respectfully submitted,
Mary Brownell AZCEC secretary